Worldchanging Talks in Seattle

Alex Steffen Executive Editor and co-founder of Worldchanging, spoke for two nights at Seattle’s Town Hall this last November. Over the course of these two talks, he called on Seattle to become North America’s first carbon-neutral city, dropping its per capita climate emissions to nothing by 2030.

That absolutely does not mean that everything we do must be perfect, or even produce a specific measurable impact. Steps that are specific and limited, but lead nonetheless to a larger goal are great, even if they alone won’t solve the whole problem. Compact fluorescents will not save the planet, but they clearly lead to reduced energy usage, and so there’s nothing wrong with encouraging their uptake as part of a march towards zero emissions in twenty years.

Even more important are cultural actions. All of the largest barriers to bright green innovation are cultural and conceptual, not technical. The technical challenges of implementation are pretty huge, but they can’t be faced at all without changing the way at least an active core of people see these issues. What does a zero-impact society look like? What is the definition of prosperity? What actually makes us happy? What parts of our lives already fail to work as advertised, and what would it feel like to transform them? How would we live in this new world?

These are questions that, fundamentally, we can only tackle through art and design, creative inquiry and intellectual exploration, conversation and media. We need a movement of people engaged in this work. For while it’s true that changing attitudes alone is not enough, inspired minds driving forward a cause is the only formula for real change that has ever worked: free your mind, and your a*@ will follow.